


Bright feathers, Sharp Scales

by Amiyusesha



Series: Dragons AU [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dragons, F/M, M/M, MHEA_Harlequin_2020, Other, Shapeshifting, Species Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22635550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiyusesha/pseuds/Amiyusesha
Summary: An isolated dragon and an isolated human who moved in together are abruptly thrust back into family and species politics they thought they had escaped from.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Dragons AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628293
Comments: 10
Kudos: 76
Collections: MHEA Harlequin Hoopla Prompt Challenge 2020





	Bright feathers, Sharp Scales

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the February 9 Dragons prompt in the Suspense (supernatural/action, any rating) category.

Tony Perched at the top of the look-out, a device of his own making delicately crafted of dragon forged brass and glass held to one eye. The three groups heading towards the cliff maintained their distinctness, even as the winding road through the trees spilled out into the low grassy area at the base of the cliff that Steve so carefully maintained as a grassland. They were definitely coming here, to Steve’s lair. They almost never had guests, but there was literally no other possible destination. The road ended at Steve’s cave entrance. Behind the cave was water, north was a marshy no man’s land, south a shifting trackless sand dune too treacherous to cross on foot. It had a tendency to swallow living things, trap them in its gullet until they rotted away, then open new trenches into those empty spaces. Nature abhors a vacuum as Steve would say.

Behind him Tony heard the scrabble of claws on stone. He didn’t take his eye from his seeing device, but he did reach out one hand. Soft feathers skimmed beneath Tony’s reaching fingers for a moment, then Tony’s hand was resting on his best friend’s wing. He lifted his head to admire the rough edged blue scales and for a moment his mind flashed back to his years in school and the taxonomy charts he had never had any trouble memorizing. What would his instructors have thought of the creature next to him? Hard scales protected the vitals, bright blue on top, creamy underneath. Feather edged protoscales slipped down the spine, raised now with curiosity. Bright red tipped the crest feathers that were currently fluffed up in a display of interest. The red was normally hidden by blue and black protoscales- razor sharp impediments to making a grab for the back of that long neck. True feathers banded in distinct lines of blue, black and white covered the wings, making them the least protected part of the dragon next to him. A concession to flight efficiency and speed, Tony thought. Would taxonomists decide that dragons were birds rather than giant lizards if they could get close enough to truly examine a live specimen? Tony rather thought they existed in a space between birds and reptiles, showing that the two must have been connected once, but biology had never been his favorite of the sciences.

“You’ve been up here for more than an hour.” Steve said, moving his wing out from under Tony’s hand and wrapping it around his back, gently tucking the human into the downy feathers along his side where scales transitioned into wing feathers. “Aren’t you cold?”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Tony responded. He truly hadn’t noticed how numb he had gotten until the nearly radiant heat of Steve’s body had reawakened those nerves. Now Steve’s heat was nearly all he could think about and he tucked his hands into Steve’s feather and snuggled against the giant heater at his side as he began to talk. “There are three completely different groups coming to visit us today. One is a groups of Queen Peggy’s guard. I can pick Dum Dum Dugan and Gabriel Jones out, even at this distance.”

“And the other two?”

“One of them is a red haired woman and a blond man driving a farm cart covered with a tarp. I expect they are planning to offer you something in exchange for your assistance in some matter.”

“That’s a lot of understanding of dragons for a human.”

“I got that right, when I came here.”

“True, but you are exceptional.” Tony shrugged and looked away, trying to hide the fact that he was as warmed by Steve’s sincere praise as thoroughly as his body heat. “You didn’t mention the third.”

“I suspect that might be my father. The carriage is marked with our Stark heraldry.” They were silent for a moment. Steve had never asked Tony why he came to the lair, anymore than Tony had asked Steve what had driven him from the dragon lands to cross an ocean and settle among humans. Neither was willing to alienate the other by asking too many questions.

“I could do a flyover, get you a description of the inside of the carriage.”

“You won’t recognize any of them, and I could just be paranoid.”

“You are paranoid.” Steve said thoughtfully. “That doesn’t mean that these strangers might not represent trouble.”

“Who would dare trouble a dragon?” Tony asked.

“Mostly other dragons, but every now and then an uppity human.” Steve nuzzled Tony’s side gently with a muzzle nearly the size of his human friend. “Let’s go inside and prepare for our guests.”

Steve sat just within their open gate, waiting for the guests to arrive. He sat on his haunches, long striped tail curled around his forefeet like a cat. With his wings tucked against his sides and his protoscales relaxed he looked like a ball of fluff. Tony watched from his comfortable seat in the lair where he had pulled a chair up next to the door and tried to remember just how intimidating he had found that pose the first time he met his dragon. It was hard to remember. Steve had long stopped being some dangerous unknown monster, and become… well… Steve. Tony was aware Steve had a more draconic name, but Steve never used it. He had adapted himself to humans a great deal. Tony had spent a long time pawing through Steve’s library, and was aware that the human comfortable courtyard and human comfortable rooms within the lair were not dragon standard. He wondered sometimes why there were so many rooms, three dragon and three human bedrooms seemed a bit much for a being who had lived alone for at least a century before Tony came along. Steve had gone so quiet and sad the one time Tony asked that he had never asked again.

Queen Peggy’s guards spilled into the courtyard first, and Steve greeted the Howling Commandos politely by name. They were an almost familiar sight up here, General Fury’s elite bandit hunters conferred regularly with Steve about what he may have seen on his patrols. “Looks like it’s a might busy up here today.” Dugan said thoughtfully as he gestured back to the road up the rock face and chewed on his cigar. “We can wait till you’re done with the rest o them. Were gonna bivouac here tomight least ways, n’less you mind.”

“Not at all. I built this courtyard for you rowdies. Camp here as often as you like.” Dugan and the rest of the troop nodded, and headed off to the side of the courtyard with the fireplace to start setting their tents up along the northern wall as usual. Steve seemed to like the commandos, and he’d lead them for awhile, but none had ever been inside Steve’s lair. As far as Tony was aware he was the only human who had ever been allowed inside Steve’s lair.

The farm cart beat the carriage into the courtyard by the simple factor of being too wide to pass on the narrow winding road up the rocks. Happy had always been a calm driver and seemed unfazed by the carriage’s slow process. Tony had heard enough of the angry voices drifting up the road before them to know that Obadiah Stane was less calm about being stuck behind a farm cart. The red headed woman driving said farm cart was completely unintimidated by him, which was rare. In Tony’s experience most people were intimidated by Obie. Once he’d thought it was Obie’s size. Now he thought it was more Obie’s certainty in his own power.

Steve was still politely greeting the farm cart couple when Happy pulled the carriage to a stop. He had a bit of a time with it, as the high strung beauties pulling the carriage had no desire to stand that close to a dragon. There was a reason the Commandos left their horses in the paddock at the base of Steve’s Rock, and a reason Steve had built said paddock. The big strong farm horse pulling the cart had no reaction to Steve, and as far as Tony was concerned that was the most interesting thing that had happened in the court yard ever. What horse does not fear dragons?

Obie was not as intimidated as the horses, which he proved by stepping out of the carriage, approaching Steve, and speaking over the red-head’s polite response to Steve’s polite greeting. Steve ignored it at first, but Tony knew the flash of temper was coming from the way Steve’s protoscales were raising up into a line of razor sharp spines along Steve’s spine. Tony had done a lot of reading about dragons before approaching Steve with his proposition, and one of those books had shown a rider mounted on a dragons’ back in front of its wings. Any human trying to ride Steve like that would have found themselves cut to shreds. When Steve wanted to fly Tony somewhere he had Tony crawl into what was basically a very large basket that Steve carried in his claws.

Eventually Steve tired of Obie enough to turn from the red-head with a snap of his neck and a low angry growl that nearly sent the carriage horses running despite Happy’s best efforts. His teeth snapped as well, inches from Obie’s suddenly wide eyes. “I WILL greet my guests in the order in which I choose, and YOU will be silent, or YOU will leave. I am allowed, by my treaty with the queen, to toss trespassers off the top of my cliff and watch as they hit the ground so very far below.” Steve hissed. His wings were mantled, claws arched from the ground, protoscales on full threat display, the very image of a dragon that humans in this delta had been raised to fear before Steve allied with the queen. Obie swallowed and took a step back, leaving Steve free to turn his attention to the farm cart couple again.

The blond man hadn’t spoken yet, his hands fidgeting with a bag between his feet. He hopped out of the cart now, walking over to Steve as if he wasn’t the slightest bit intimidating. He whispered something in Steve’s ear, and wasn’t it interesting that he knew enough about dragons to know exactly where Steve’s ear was. Steve jerked back, startled, glanced at the covered bed of the farm wagon, and then looked over at Dugan. “Would one of you mind taking this horse down to the pasture with yours? I need to take this cart inside for a bit.” The Commandos looked as startled by this pronouncement as Tony felt, but Jim Morita stepped forward to take the horse from the red head who was already unharnessing it. Steve snagged the front of the cart with one set of claws and backed calmly through the doors of his lair dragging the cart right along with him. The red-head and the blond followed, and when it looked like Obie might take that as an invitation Tony firmly closed and barred the doors behind them. The red head glanced around, but seemed unsurprised by Tony’s presence. The blond only had eyes for the cart.

As soon as the cart was positioned where Steve wanted it in the Lair’s large, circular main chamber Steve hopped around it, easily removing the cover the two humans must have struggled to lash down alone, and exposing a second, much smaller dragon. At first Tony thought the new dragon was dead, but as he watched it took a single slow breath, the black feathers of the wings dropped haphazardly near its muzzle stirring in the soft exhale. Tony skittered closer to look at the white speckled black feather’s and scales of the new dragon. It was probably around the size of the feather ankled Clydesdale which had been pulling the cart, and was likely the method by which said horse had been trained to not fear dragons. That would make him one third Steve’s size, but Steve would never lay the way this dragon was positioned. It really looked like the two humans, and maybe the cart horse, had dragged the dragon into the cart and then tried as best they could to position him semi comfortably.

“What’s wrong with him?” Tony asked quietly.

“We don’t know.” The red-head answered.

“We’ve been helping him look for a thing.” The blond said quietly. “The name is unpronounceable by humans, and like a paragraph when translated, so I was just calling it the goober. It amused him as much as it annoyed him, so he let me. We found a thing he thought was THE thing. He told us not to touch it, and we listened since it was turning every human that touched it into statues that crumbled into dust as soon as they were disturbed in any way. He seemed to be handling it just fine, and he got all excited, but when he tried to do something with it, it turned into light that stabbed him and he collapsed.” He looked over at Steve. “He talked about you a lot… at least I think it was you he was talking about… dragon names are so weird, blue star bright or something since colors don’t translate right. He even started going by Phil when we heard rumors about you going by Steve… I just thought that if anyone knew how to help him it would be you.”

Steve was clambering around the cart while the blond talked, delicately maneuvering the unconscious dragon around. Steve re-positioned Phil’s legs and wings, curling the smaller dragon’s spine gently so it looked like he was resting comfortably in the cart rather than having been tossed in haphazardly. The odd thing was that the longer the two touched the brighter the glow around them became, a soft golden light that sparked green and blue where they touched. “I didn’t know anyone had decided to emulate me.” Steve commented softly.

Tony cleared his throat when silence fell after that. “I didn’t know you could glow, Steve.”

“Oh, ummm, I think the artifact piece I have, and the artifact piece he has are reacting to each other.” Steve commented thoughtfully. “I suspect the problem is that he wasn’t prepared to merge with it. I mean… He probably meant to use it rather than merge with it, and ended up doing both. My teacher told me never to try to use them unless all three are together and then killed himself using mine without any of the others around. They are supposed to glow when near each other, which is why I thought I could find the others.”

“And there are three, and dragon culture once revolved around them.” The red head said softly, “and now you only have legends about how they worked.”

“Wait! These are the triangle things in all those books! With the untranslatable names that always start and end with triangles!”

“Yes.” Steve responded. “I think if want to wake Phil up, we need to find this one a proper bearer. I suspect he meant it for one of the two of you. Is one of you in love with him?”

“What.” Said the red-head blankly.

“What does it matter?” asked the blond.

“How would that WORK?” asked Tony, who had spent more time than he cared to admit to anyone studying Steve’s books on dragon anatomy, before deciding that there was really no possibility of him and Steve moving passed cuddling.

Steve studied the three blank faced humans and then settled back on his haunches in his lecturing pose. “Right… so… most creatures resemble other creatures to some extent, like deer, which are similar to horses, which are similar to cows.” Tony nodded encouragingly, he had studied taxonomy. “But dragons don’t resemble anything else, not really, and that’s because everything like us died a long time ago. There was a great disaster, and whole continents worth of beings were exterminated all at once. A group of dragons saw the inevitable death that was approaching and hid themselves away deep in the earth to wait out the disaster. When they woke the world was completely different, but capable of supporting them again. They built themselves a new home on the surface and went about their lives until they realized the problem with not inviting their non-wizard brethren into their seclusion with them. After only a handful of generations the eggs stopped hatching. Their population was too small, and to closely related in the beginning, to be a viable foundation for re-establishing their species. They needed new dragons who weren’t related to them if they were to survive as a species, and all such candidates had been dead for millennia. They turned to magic to solve this problem, as they had turned to magic to solve all of their problems, and they discovered a solution. The three greatest among them gave their lives to combine all of the dragon’s magic into one artifact that exists in three parts. The artifact allows unrelated creatures to become dragon hybrids, capable of switching between their two forms at will. Eggs produced between a hybrid and a dragon hatch healthy young dragons.”

“So how did something so fundamental to dragon reproduction become lost?” The red head asked with some confusion.

“The population recovered and dragons stopped valuing them. Born dragons started disdaining humans and hybrids and insisted on breeding only with other born dragons. The term Purebred came into use and the leader of the ‘purebred’ tried to take the artifact from its bearers by force and use it to exterminate any dragon with human ancestry. The artifact broke in his hands, each piece shooting off in its own direction and he was left scarred and unsatisfied in a world where he had to hunt down mixed heritage dragons and kill them himself. Then the eggs started to not hatch, and the eggs that did hatch produced young that were weak, and sickly. My teacher went looking for the artifact, and started campaigning against purebred ideology. It didn’t go well for him, and he started thinking that the best thing to do would be to establish some new city of dragons founded on the ideals of diversity and freedom…”Steve trailed off. “Anyway I’m pretty sure the piece Phil has is the piece that was traditionally held by a hybrid. He isn’t one, which is why he can’t manage it. It is usually granted to a human during the course of making them a hybrid, which is why normal humans touching it was so bad for them.”

“So, we need to get it out of him by giving it to someone who was born human while in the process of turning them into a human-dragon hybrid?” Tony asked excitedly. “Can I volunteer?”

“Don’t we need all three for that to work?” The red-head asked.

“It… wants to do what it was meant to do.” Steve said hesitantly. “And it can’t turn Phil into a dragon because he already is one. It destroyed those other humans because the other pieces of the artifact weren’t there to regulate its power and it didn’t have a proper bearer to direct it.”

“So we should all three try to become dragons. That will diffuse it somewhat and you can keep it from killing us with your piece. The only other solution is to go on a quest for the third piece, try and find a dragon to bear the third piece, and come back to try exactly this thing with all three pieces, if any of us live that long.”

“Pretty much, though with two pieces together the third piece should be drawn here, if it has a bearer to carry it. I can make sure this piece doesn’t kill Phil indefinitely, but I can’t do that and go looking for the third piece.”

“Hey,” Tony said cheerfully, “If my choices are to play with strange magic that might kill me or go back out front and deal with Obie I choose the strange magic.”

“So that rude man isn’t your father?” Steve’s relief was obvious and palpable. Tony didn’t have the heart to tell him that Obie was usually better to deal with than Howard.

“No. It’s his business partner. Obie was kind of any uncle to me… the kind of uncle who is creepy now, and was really into me when I was young enough to be delighted by his attention since I had nothing healthy to compare it to.”

“The other two people in the carriage were a dark skinned man and a red-headed woman.”

“There are too many options there. If I’m lucky its Rhodey and Pepper.”

“Perhaps you should go...” the red head started.

“Nope.” Tony interrupted. “He is just here to manipulate me into doing something he wants. That’s all he ever wants, and all he ever wanted. This is important, and once Phil is better I’ll deal with whatever threats Obie escalates to when his bribes don’t work.” Tony looked over at Steve. “Where do you want me for this?”

“Where do you want us for this?” The blond added.

“Yes, position all of us so the thing has a choice,” the red-head mused.

“You all three want to try this?” Steve asked uncertainly.

“A chance to become a dragon? Not one of us is foolish enough to turn that down.” The red head said.

Steve maneuvered the three humans around, then took a position near Phil where he could coax the glow out of the other dragon. Brilliant threads of light wove around his claws for a moment before lashing out into the room, soaking into flesh that bloomed with feathers for the moment before the light winked out of existence. Dragon fire lit the sconces around the room and a black and white dragon woke shortly after. He and the blue were deep in conversation by the time a red and gold dragon, a purple and white dragon and a red, white and black dragon joined them. Exhausted the five soon separated for slumber, one bedroom a mix of black, white and purple feathers, a second full of blue, white, red and gold. Black, white and red should have been curled up in the third, but restless and paranoid their owner had slipped back out into the main room to keep an eye on the door.

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious- I based Steve's coloring and Patterns on a blue jay. Phil and Clint are both based on Starlings (European and Purple-back). Tony's colors are reminiscent of a Flame Bower bird, and Natasha dragon is colored like a male crimson chat.


End file.
